Part 15

HUNTING IN LIBERIA

In the year 1911 the search for new hunting grounds took me to Liberia, the Black Republic. I secured a passage by tramp steamer to Sinoe Town, Greenwood County, some few hundred miles south of the capital Monrovia. Here I landed with my little camp outfit and a decent battery, comprising a ·318 Mauser and a ·22 rook rifle.

Right on the threshold I was met by conditions which are unique in Africa, with possibly the exception of Abyssinia; for here the white man comes under the rule of the black, and any attempt at evasion or disregard of it is quickly and forcibly resented, as I witnessed immediately on stepping ashore. Among a crowd of blacks was a white man held powerless. His appearance seeming familiar, I had a nearer look, and was astonished to recognise one of the officers of the tramp steamer from which I had just landed. I asked him what the trouble was about, but he could only curse incoherently. Just then a very polite black man, in blue uniform and badge-cap, informed me that the officer had struck a native, and that the officer would have to answer for it to the magistrate. He was then promptly taken before the beak, who fined him 25 dollars and the ship’s captain 50 dollars, although the latter had not even been on shore.

After this episode I began to wonder what I had let myself in for. I found, however, that my informant in uniform was the Customs officer, and extremely polite and anxious to help me to pass my gear through. He seemed to have absolute power in his department, and let me off very lightly indeed. In all my dealings I invariably treated the Liberians with the greatest politeness, and I was invariably received in the same way.

As soon as I had got clear of the Customs I looked out for a lodging of some sort. There were no hotels, of course, but eventually I found an Englishman who represented a rubber company. He very kindly put me up. I found that my host was the only Englishman, he, with a German trader, comprising the white community.

My host, whom I will call B., was much interested in my expedition into the interior. He told me frankly that I would have a devil of a time. He said that the jurisdiction of the Liberians extended inland for about ten miles only, and beyond that the country was in the hands of the original natives. These were all armed with guns and a few rifles, and were constantly at war with each other. This I found to be true.

As I was determined to penetrate and see for myself, he advised me to call on the Governor; also that I should take suitable presents to him. I resolved to do so. On my friend’s advice I bought a case of beer and a case of Kola wine, the Governor, it appeared, being very partial to these beverages mixed. He told me that if I pressed a golden sovereign into his hand I should get what I wanted, i.e., a permit to hunt elephant.

I had to engage servants, and B. said I could either buy them or hire them. He explained that slavery was rampant. Whenever a tribe in the interior brought off a successful raid on their neighbours the captives were generally brought to the coast and there sold to the Liberians, themselves liberated slaves from the United States of America. Alcoholism was so prevalent and widespread and had reached such a pitch that scarcely any children are born to the Liberians proper, in which case they buy bush children and adopt them as their own.

B. was going to a dance that night, and asked me if I would care to go with him. I was anxious to see what I could of the people and agreed to go. Later on I was surprised to see B. in full evening dress. He explained that everyone dressed. Now, as I had not brought mine, it was very awkward. But B. said it would be all right. As we were changing, a fine buxom black girl burst into our house and marched straight upstairs to B.’s room, throwing wide the door. There was B. with his white shirt and nothing else. I closed my door, but could hear the lady engaging B. for some of the dances. She then asked for the white man who had arrived that day, and then my door was thrown open. I was far from dressed myself, and something about my appearance seemed to tickle the lady immensely, for she went into peals of the jolliest laughter. She spoke English with a strong American accent, as nearly all the Liberians do. She made me promise to dance with her that night, in spite of my protests that I could not dance at all. She turned the place upside down and then departed. I hastened to ask B. what kind of dances they had, and he told me they liked waltzing best.

After dinner we sauntered off to a large barn, where a musical din denoted the dance. Here we found a fine lay-out. Lavish refreshments, chiefly composed of cakes, cold pork, gin and beer, were provided for all. Everybody was very jolly, and they could dance, or so it seemed to me. The girls were nearly all in white or pink dresses, but not very décolleté. A tall coal-black gentleman in full evening dress was master of ceremonies, but introductions soon became unnecessary. Round the refreshments gathered the old men, some in frock coats of a very ancient cut, others in more modern garments. I was hospitably pressed to drink. The musicians drank without pressing. Everybody drank, women and all. What added zest was the fact that the fines inflicted on the steamer captain and his officer paid for the feast. German export beer and Hamburg potato spirit were then only a few pence per bottle, consequently the dance became a debauch, seasoned drinkers though they were. The din and heat became terrific. Starched collars turned to sodden rags and things indescribable happened. Thus ended my first day in the Black Republic.

As notice had been sent the Governor of my intended visit, and I had bought the necessary beer and Kola wine, next day I set off to visit him at his residence, some little way out of town. Bush, with clearings planted with coffee, describes the country between the town and the Governor’s residence, itself situated in a large coffee plantation. The house was of lumber construction and two storeys high, well built, and the largest I had yet seen. I marched up, followed by B’s two boys carrying the present, to the front door. I was met immediately by a splendid-looking old black, very tall, very black, dressed in a long black frock coat, high starched collar and black cravat. With snow-white hair and Uncle Sam beard and accent to match, he received me in a really kind and hearty manner. I must confess that I felt rather diffident with my two cases of cheap liquor in the background, while I fingered a few hot sovereigns in my pocket. However, the bluff old fellow soon put me at my ease. Seeing the stuff out there on the boys’ heads, he beckoned them in, helped them to lower their load, shouted to someone to come and open the boxes, sent the boys in to get a drink, and ushered me into his sitting-room, all in the jolliest manner possible. Here we talked a bit, and then I told him what I had come for. A permit to hunt elephant! Ha! ha! ha! he roared. Of course I should have a permit to hunt elephant. He wrote it there and then. Would I stop for dinner? I said I would be delighted. Then we had beer and Kola wine mixed until lunch was announced. Then the old boy took off his coat and invited me to do likewise. I did so and followed my host into the eating-room. Here was a long trestle table laid for about twenty people—white tablecloth, knives, forks, etc. As we seated ourselves, in trooped enchanting little black girls, all dressed neatly in moderately clean print dresses, with arms, necks, and legs bare. And then Mrs. Governor appeared with some larger girls. After shaking hands we all sat down to a very substantial meal. It was perfectly charming. Everyone was at ease. The old man was an excellent host and the old lady just as good a hostess. Conversation never flagged. The old man was full of his brother’s doings. It appeared that his brother was a lazy, good-for-nothing fellow, who would let his cows stray on to his neighbours’ plantations. My host had repeatedly remonstrated, but without effect. So that morning, having discovered some of his brother’s cows meandering about the plantation, he had gone straight for his shot-gun and had rendered at least one incapable of further depredations. This act had, it appeared, stirred the brother profoundly, but in an unusual way, for he could be heard for miles bawling religious songs from his bedroom window. Whenever there was a lull during lunch we heard the monotonous chant, which appeared to amuse my host immensely.

All the little girls were called their children, but I subsequently found that the old couple were quite childless, and that these were bush children from the interior and were now adopted.

My host told me that he had been a slave in the Southern States; he said he could remember well being flogged. He said that elephant were numerous in the interior, also bush-cow (the little red buffalo), leopard, and the pigmy hippo. As regards the tribes, he laughed and said that they were a rough lot. He said that Liberia was almost continually at war with them. In this connection I heard afterwards that the bush men had been down on a raid to a neighbouring town. They had seized, stripped, and tarred and feathered the Governor, raided and carried off all the liquor in the trading stores, and enjoyed themselves generally.

Altogether, Liberia was, at the time of which I write, about the funniest show it has ever been my lot to see. When they set up their Customs to levy import duty on spirits, etc., they soon discovered that an extensive and very lucrative trade in smuggling started up. Steamers used to draw in close to the coast and sell for spot cash and gold dust whole cargoes of gin, gunpowder, caps, and articles of general trade. Natives would put off in their canoes in clouds, and in a very short time the cargo would be sold on deck and landed. In order to stop this the Republic bought a second-hand steam yacht which had originally belonged to King Leopold, I believe. For the following account of the doings of this navy I am indebted to B.; for its accuracy I cannot vouch.

According to B., then, the yacht was armed with a light gun and some machine guns. The crew were all blacks, with the exception of the captain, who was an Englishman. This Englishman was admiral of the fleet, captain and commander all in one. Evidently his gunners were so bad that he found it necessary to fire the gun himself whenever it had to be fired. As his salary was never forthcoming when due, he used to take it out of the fines he imposed on ships caught in the act. That he was energetic is shown by his first encounter with a smuggling ship. This happened to be a German, well inside the three-mile limit. The Liberian navy signalled her to stop. She disregarded this and carried on. The admiral jumped to his gun and let fly a shot across her bows. She still carried on. So then the admiral let rip and carried away a part of her bridge with the first shot. One can imagine the guttural curses and funk on that German bridge. Nothing more was needed, she hove to. The game ceased to be so popular after this encounter. Smuggling by the shipload was stopped. Passing through the French West African port, Dakkar, some time after my visit to Liberia, I saw the Liberian navy—a beautiful little craft—lying at anchor. In answer to my enquiries I was told that she had been in dock for repairs, that the bill for these amounted to some £600, that the Republican Treasury had been unable to meet it, and that the repairers refused to let her sail until it was met. How long she remained there I cannot say.

With the acquisition of the hunting permit and the hiring of some lads from the interior, I was soon ready for the road. For ten miles or so we passed through lazily-kept coffee plantations, mostly worked by slave labour. The coffee is excellent, but produced without system. After this we began to rise gradually through virgin forests, with no inhabitants. Our road was a mere footpath. There were no flies, which was pleasant. Throughout the forest country there were neither flies nor mosquitoes, in spite of the dampness.

The first night we camped in the bush, where there were three huts. In one of these huts there lived a sort of “medicine” man. I got hold of him and asked him about my prospects of finding elephant. He was the most wide-awake business man I had met since leaving London, for he at once offered to make such “medicine” as would lead to my killing elephant with large tusks in great numbers. I told him to fire away, but before doing so he asked what I would give him. I promised that if I got large tusks I would give him a case of gin. He was delighted, but wanted a few heads of tobacco added. This was also agreed to. He said I might consider the whole thing arranged. Then he asked me if I would care to buy gold dust. I said yes. He then produced a tiny skin bag of the stuff. I scoffed and said that I could not be troubled with quantities so small. Turning indifferently away, I was about to leave him, when he said he had some more. He produced more of it, little by little, until there was perhaps £80 worth. Then I became more interested and asked him what he wanted for it. Gunpowder came the answer at once. I told him I had none. When he had brought himself to believe this he said he would exchange it for an equal weight of golden sovereigns. Had his stuff been pure this “trade” might have shown a small profit; but as it was obviously not so I, of course, refused to buy. As a matter of curiosity I bought a pinch of his dust and subsequently found that it contained about 25 per cent. of brass filings. There were certainly no flies on that magic-monger.

To his business of making medicine this hoary old rascal added the, perhaps, more lucrative one of slave dealing; for when I had retired to my camp-bed my boy came to tell me that the medicine man wished to see me. I told the boy to tell him to go now and come in the morning. The answer came that he wanted to see me very particularly. He was let in and came with a pleasant-looking young native girl following. She carried a small calabash, which the old man took from her and gave it to me, saying it was a present of honey. The girl remained kneeling and sitting on her heels. The old ruffian kept leering at her and then leering at me. He wished to sell her.

As we expected to reach the first village of the bush people that day, we were off early in the morning. As a rule, in forest country it is as well not to start too early. Until ten or eleven o’clock the bush bordering the narrow native trails is saturated with moisture and remains wet even after the passage of several people; then there is no sun to contend with, as in open country.

On the way we saw monkeys of several kinds and tracks of bush-buck and bush-cow. Hornbills were common and various kinds of forest birds. The country was in ridges, heavily wooded, with running streams of clear cold water in the hollows. Here and there could be seen scratchings where natives had been looking for gold. The whole of this country is auriferous, I believe. The gold is alluvial, and the particles widely separated by dirt; too widely for Europeans, I expect.

Late in the afternoon we arrived at the village. They knew of our coming, and the headman met us with a crowd of his people, and jolly independent in manner they were. Among the crowd there was quite a sprinkling of trade guns of the percussion cap type. Almost immediately I was shown to the hut allocated to travellers, and very grateful its shade and coolness were after the long and hilly march. Water and firewood were brought, and the cook got busy. The construction of the huts was new to me and quite excellent. The floor of the hut was raised some four feet off the ground and consisted of stout bamboo mats tightly stretched over poles. As the mats were rather loosely woven, all dirt and water simply fell through to the ground. If a bath is required you squat on the floor and dash the water over yourself; it all runs through and soon dries up again. Then the mats, being springy, make a most excellent bed. Vermin are absent. One is obliged to have one of the huts, as the bush runs close up to the villages, leaving no room for a tent, besides which the ground is so damp as to make a floor well off the ground desirable.

After refreshment I called the headman and told him I had come to hunt elephant. He asked to see my rifle. I showed it to him, my ·318. He smiled and said it would not do, peering into the small muzzle. He called for his own to show me, a huge affair, muzzle-loading and shooting a long wooden harpoon with an iron head heavily poisoned. But, he said, my rifle might do for bush-cow, of which there were plenty near at hand. He asked me if I would go after them next morning. I did not wish to a bit, but I thought it might be as well to create a good impression by killing something, so I promised to try. He then left me, and presently a nice present of food, a couple of fowls and eggs, arrived.

On the morrow I left for the bush with some local guides. We soon found fresh bush-cow tracks and took them up. They led through a lot of deadly thick stuff, wet and cold. The guides made such a noise that I thought any bush-cow that allowed us near enough to see them would have to be both sound asleep and deaf; and so it turned out, for presently we heard them stampeding through the bush. I gave it up at once, and consoled the natives by promising to kill some monkeys for them on the way back, which I had no difficulty in doing. Arrived back in the village, I gave the headman a couple of monkeys and some tobacco in return for the hospitality we had enjoyed. Then we set off forward for the hunting grounds. We had a set-back about half way, as our guides deserted us, saying they were at war with the people we were going to. This is always awkward in Africa, for the paths are so misleading. There was nothing for it but to trust to luck and push on.

After some miles of chancing our way along we saw a native on the path. As soon as we saw him he saw us and dived into the bush, trailing his long gun dangerously behind him. The alarm was out, and it was imperative to arrive at the village before anything could be organised. I gave my rifle to a boy to carry and on we went. Luckily the village was handy, and we marched straight into the middle of it and sat down, the natives, who had been having a pow-wow, scattering right and left. This is always a very disconcerting thing for natives; they seemed quite lost to see what they had regarded as an enemy an instant before sitting quietly right in the middle of their town. It is necessary on these occasions to suppress any signs of nervousness on the part of one’s followers, which is not always easy. When this is done and there is no flourishing of lethal weapons I have never known it to fail. In a short time up came the headman, in an awful funk, but outwardly composed. He demanded of me what I wanted. I said, “Sit down!” He continued to stand. I told one of my boys to bring a mat, and beckoned the headman to sit down. He did. Then I told him why we were there, and that if they showed us elephant they should have the meat. He went away and had a talk with some of his men, who had returned from the bush. I noticed that nearly all of them were armed with guns. Presently he came back and led me to a hut. I got the thing made habitable, and the usual procedure of peaceful travellers went on. No notice was taken by us of anyone, and presently the native women began to be once more visible, a pretty fair indication that no hostilities were intended, for the moment, at any rate. In an hour or two the headman came in most cordial mood. He had been pushing enquiries among my boys, I knew. Apparently all was well. He said I could not have come to a better spot for elephant, or to a better man than himself. He presumed that I had heard of him; he seemed to think that London must be ringing with his prowess. I did not tell him I had never heard of him; I merely smiled.

His news was most inspiring, although I knew enough of Africans to discount 75 per cent. of it. He said the bush was full of elephant. I decided to try next day for them, and told the headman so. He laughed and said we would have to sleep some nights in the bush and that food would have to be taken. Therefore, the following day was devoted to preparing food for the journey. In the evening I warned the people that I was going to fire, and showed them the penetration of a modern rifle with solid bullet. I chose for this purpose a certain white-barked tree, the wood of which I knew, from former trials, set up less resistance to the passage of a bullet than that of other trees. This particular tree was very thick, and I hoped the bullet would not fail to come out on the other side. It traversed it easily, to my relief and the astonishment of the natives, who came in crowds to see the exit hole. Of course, none of their guns would have looked at it. It is just this kind of childish little thing that impresses Africans, and when done quietly and indifferently enough is most useful. In this case the effect was doubled by the fact that in their mode of waging war the taking of cover behind trees was more than half the game. Luckily, no one was sufficiently acute to ask me to fire through some of the smaller but much tougher trees. They began to think that my rifle might kill elephant after all.

On the morrow we stored our heavy loads in the headman’s hut and left for the bush. I took my camp-bed, and a ground-sheet which could be slung on a stick over it when it rained. These, with some plain food and 200 rounds of cartridges, comprised the loads, and, as we had plenty of followers, each man was lightly laden.

After passing through some plantations we were almost immediately in the virgin forest. We trekked hard all that day without seeing anything more interesting than monkeys and forest pig, but on the following day the country began to show signs of game. Bush-cow tracks became common, and we crossed several elephant paths, but devoid of recent tracks. This day I saw for the first time the comparatively tiny tracks of the pigmy hippo. In one place quite a herd of them had passed in the night. I gathered from the natives that they sometimes remained throughout the day in the dark pools of the smaller forest streams, but that usually they passed the daytime in the larger streams, when they would come up to breathe under the overhanging banks, only the nostrils emerging from the water. The reason for this extreme shyness appeared to be that the natives possessed firearms, the animals were quite defenceless, and the price of meat was high in all this stockless country. There exists such a dearth of flesh food that cannibalism is practised. Towards evening we reached a stream, on the bank of which it was decided we should camp. While a clearing was being made someone spotted a python coiled up on a rock a few feet out in the stream. They called me to come and shoot it. I ran up with my rifle to do so, and arrived just as the great snake was beginning to uncoil itself. First its head came, more and more of its body uncoiling behind it until the head reached the shore, the body bridging the space between it and the rock, where there still remained several coils. It landed in face of us, and I was waiting till enough of it had reached hard ground before firing. Meanwhile the boys, who had been clearing bush, rushed up with their slashers and attacked the huge serpent vigorously. It appeared to make no attempt to defend itself and was soon disabled by a few dozen blows on the head and neck. Although dead, the body continued to writhe with great force as it was being cut up into sections. All the natives were in high glee at securing so much good food. They said it was very good to eat, and certainly the flesh looked all right. When cooked, it became as white as boiled cod and seemed to lie in layers in the same way. The python was about 16 ft. long and contained the almost digested remains of one or more monkeys.

As I had killed two or three monkeys for them during the day the boys had a splendid feast with the python added. I noticed that they ate the python and roasted the monkeys whole to carry forward cold. I gathered that elephant might be expected next day.